[humanser] The patient ran away!

[JD Townsend]

Hello:

Oh yes (smile).  This happens frequently with resistant patients, especially 
if they were brought to psychotherapy against their will or brought in by 
pretense, having been lied to about the purpose of the visit by a parent.


Below is an article from an email list I provide to psychotherapists I 
supervise that I thought might interest you:

from the NEW YORK TIMES, Sunday Magazine

The Morality of Meditation.
By DAVID DeSTENO.  David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at
Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions
Group.  He is the author of the forthcoming book 'The Truth About
Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and M.
MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your
mind.  With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can
enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized
intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is
growing.  A number of 'mindfulness' training programs, like that
developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and
conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders,
promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to
augment individual performance, leadership and productivity.
This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it,
there's a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable)
pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation
was originally intended.  Gaining competitive advantage on exams
and increasing creativity in business weren't of the utmost
concern to Buddha and other early meditation teachers.  As Buddha
himself said, 'I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering
and the end of suffering.  For Buddha, as for many modern
spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that.
The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was
supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and
more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the
categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people
from one another..
But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended
effect - the reduction of suffering - empirically demonstrable?
To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by the
psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaélle
Desbordes and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an
experiment whose publication is forthcoming in the journal
Psychological Science.  We recruited 39 people from the Boston
area who were willing to take part in an eight-week course on
meditation (and who had never taken any such course before).  We
then randomly assigned 20 of them to take part in weekly
meditation classes, which also required them to practice at home
using guided recordings.  The remaining 19 were told that they
had been placed on a waiting list for a future course.
After the eight-week period of instruction, we invited the
participants to the lab for an experiment that purported to
examine their memory, attention and related cognitive abilities.
But as you might anticipate, what actually interested us was
whether those who had been meditating would exhibit greater
compassion in the face of suffering.  To find out, we staged a
situation designed to test the participants' behavior before they
were aware that the experiment had begun.
WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or
she) found three chairs, two of which were already oc'cup'ied.
Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair.  As he waited, a fourth
person, using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot,
entered the room and audibly sighed in pain as she leaned
uncomfortably against a wall.  The other two people in the room -
who, like the woman on crutches, secretly worked for us - ignored
the woman, thus confronting the participant with a moral
quandary.  Would he act compassionately, giving up his chair for
her, or selfishly ignore her plight?
The results were striking.  Although only 16 percent of the
nonmeditators gave up their seats - an admittedly disheartening
fact - the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had
meditated.  This increase is impressive not solely because it
occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because
it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit
considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in
distress - what psychologists call the bystander effect - reduces
the odds that any single individual will help.  Nonetheless, the
meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.
Although we don't yet know why meditation has this effect, one of
two explanations seems likely.  The first rests on meditation's
documented ability to enhance attention, which might in turn
increase the odds of noticing someone in pain (as opposed to
being lost in one's own thoughts).  My favored explanation,
though, derives from a different aspect of meditation: its
ability to foster a view that all beings are interconnected.  The
psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I have found that any marker
of affiliation between two people, even something as subtle as
tapping their hands together in synchrony, causes them to feel
more compassion for each other when distressed.  The increased
compassion of meditators, then, might stem directly from
meditation's ability to dissolve the artificial social
distinctions - ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like - that
divide us.
Supporting this view, recent findings by the neuroscientists
Helen Weng, Richard Davidson and colleagues confirm that even
relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter
neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic
understanding of others' distress - areas whose responsiveness is
also modulated by a person's degree of felt associations with
others.
So take heart.  The next time you meditate, know that you're not
just benefiting yourself, you're also benefiting your neighbors,
community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the
odds that you'll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to
lessen it as well..

JD

-----Original Message----- 
From: Gerardo Corripio
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 2013 10:47 AM
To: Human Services Mailing List
Subject: [humanser] The patient ran away!

  HI guys
An experience I'll never forget during private practice is the
following: It was a Monday here in Mexico; a holiday that one wants to
stay at home, or go out. Anyway just starting to eat breakfast when a
call came about a patient wanting to see me. There I go to reach the
appointment; the patient waits outside while my mother takes her basic
info (she's my secretary);the patient is a teenager whose probably
wanted to commit suicide (my mother told me later she had an arm in a
sleen and looked very very scared); we later found out her mother was
the one who called to make the appointment. Anyhow I found it easy to go
outside quickly and get a drink of water since that's my usual routine.
One minute I was hearing the mother give the info to my mother, and the
next suddenly the door closed, the mother said we'll see if we come back
later and everybody left! How did I feel? You can imagine! Have any of
this happened to you before?

-- 
Gera
Saludos desde Tampico, Tamaulipas México
acseso+subscribe-ios at googlegroups.com Foro/lista donde tomando en cuenta las 
capacidades de cada miembro, aprenderémos entretodos el uso, y sacarémos el 
máximo de nuestros Iphones! Los espero!


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JD Townsend LCSW
Helping the light dependent to see.
Daytona Beach, Earth, Sol System